WILLIAM BLAKE AND A CENTENARY

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 121, 12 August 1927, Page 12

WILLIAM BLAKE AND A CENTENARY

(Written for THE SUN.) There have been men who loved the future like a mistress, and the future mixed her breath into their breath, and shook her hair about them, and hid them from the understanding of their times. —W. B. Yeats. QNE hundred years ago to-day, at 3 Fountain Court, an alley off the Strand, William Blake, poet and painter, died in Ms 69th year as dusk was falling. He had spent the day composing songs to his Maker, and giving his distressed wife assurance that he would guard her after his body’s death. He died as he had lived —in a state of saint-like faith and exaltation. Five days later, he was buried in a common grave in Bunhill Fields, and those who would now honour him with a memorial cannot find his rest-ing-place. During his lifetime, Blake made a few loyal friends who recognised his genius, but the world that he lived in, was, for the most part, content to let him pass by unnoted. There were times when he mixed with the mighty

of his day, and Henry Crabb Robinso -, the diarist, in an entry of Tuly 24, 1811, writes: “Late to C. Lamb's. Found a very large party there. Southey had been with Blake and admired both his designs and his poetic talents. At the same time he held him for a decided madman. Blake, he said, spoke of his visions with the diffidence that is usual for such people.” Robinson then asks: “Shall 1 call him artist or genius—mystic or madman? Probably he is all.” So it was that Blake baffled his contemporaries. He had broken away from the traditions which enslaved them; created philosophy of his own; announced his sympathy with all living things, sinful and righteous alike, and found that religion and art were one. Then, he told them stories of his visions of fairies; glimpses of God, and conversations with the spirit of Voltaire. These visions, no more than the vivid dreams of other people, were made evidence of his insanity. Blake now needs no apology or defence, for he stands unassailable on a lonely pinnacle in English literature. No other poet was more faithful to his life purpose than he was, and only the greatest of the Renaissance artists lived with their spiritual and physical lives so perfectly harmonised as his. There was an absolute unity of character in all his work, and with marvellous and constant faith in his own vision he believed only what he saw. To Blake, art and Christianity were synonymous terms, and to his mind damnation was nothing more than an absence of art. Professor Walter Raleigh has described his work as “one prolonged vindication of all the artists of the world.” Richly imaginative, he wrote at white heat, never revising, and believing to the end that genius and inspiration were one. Osbert Burdett, in his recently published study of Blake in the new English Men of Letters series, says: “His value to his age was that he overstated with all the lyric emphasis at his command certain artistic truths which were underestimated in his time.” Hidden from the understanding of his time, Blake has had to wait nearly a century for the recognition he deserved, and now his fame is gradually rising to its zenith. A few followers who gathered about him in his declining years had unwavering faith in

their master, and the stern assize of new generations has judged as they did.

Blake is the only Englishman who has been a genius in two arts. Rossetti certainly was a poet and a painter but he was an Italian who wrote in English, and in many ways was influenced by Blake. It is only in this century that Blake’s pictorial genius has been adequately recognised, and there are critics now who would rate him higher as a painter than a poet. In the realm of imaginative design there is very little in English that can be placed above or even beside his work. Colour he handled heavily with tremendous contrast and little subtlety, but always with vigorous, domineering effect. There is magnificent strength in his compositions: movement and vitality in the figures. The stark, bleak beauty of “The Crucifixion” leaves one with a terrible feeling of desolation, and the group of dicing soldiers at the foot of Christ’s cross is superb irony. If Blake’s poetry is to be enjoyed to the full it is necessary to have some understanding of his symbolic system. He could never make direct statement, and even his simple lyrics have to be studied carefully in the light of his symbolism if the gold which his great mind planted is to be found. For instance, in these verses: Bring me my bow of burning gold; Bring me my arrows of desire; Bring me my spear; O clouds unfold! Bring me my chariot of fire. J will not cease from Mental fight Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand Till we have built Jerusalem In England’s green and pleasant land. i. Now that sounds well. It is fine poetry, but the casual reader must baulk at Jerusalem. For Blake, Jerusalem was the symbol of his ideal. It was a city of the spirit which represented a perfected type of humanity. Things such as these must be understood, or the best of Blake flows by. Casually, one may enjoy the fluidity and simplicity of the lyrics, but there is much more in the poems than that. Blake was the poet of the human soul, and that vast theme he built up with the perfection of a symphony. In “Songs of Innocence” he told of the original state of the soul, taking as his symbol the innocence of childhood. Then come the “Songs of Experience,” in which the soul sheds its illusions, and the state contrary to innocence is discovered. Innocence is heaven; experience is hell, and the necessary for these contrary states is explained in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell." As Blake says: “Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, Reason and energy, Love and hate, q.re necessary to human existence.” His gigantic theme is elaborated in the Prophetic Books, which require patient, specialised study. As Professor Raleigh says: “No domestic and familiar truths await the explorer, in these labyrinths, rather the strange glow of the furnace at the heart of things, where the rocks are melted and the stuff of the enduring hills is prepared for its life on the surface of the earth.” Blake' was buried on August 17, in the presence of less than a dozen friends. He left no debts, and his legacy to his wife was his unsold pictures. , Though the winds of life blew warm and chill about him, Blake never turned from his championship of the oppressed and his faith-keeping. The future, which was his mistress, has taken a good man to her arms. lAN DONNELLY. Auckland.